U.S. President Joe Biden will hold a farewell meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Lima on Saturday on the sidelines of an annual multilateral summit, senior administration officials said, as deep differences remain over a range of issues ahead of Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
It will be their first in-person meeting in a year, with the U.S. officials saying Wednesday that Biden will take stock of efforts during his time in office to “responsibly manage” the intense competition between the two countries so as to prevent it from veering into confrontation or conflict.
During their previous talks near San Francisco, also held in conjunction with a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, the presidents agreed to partly reopen military-to-military lines of communication and advance cooperation in areas of shared interest, including artificial intelligence and counternarcotics.
Combined photo shows U.S. President Joe Biden (L, Getty/Kyodo) and Chinese President Xi Jinping. (Kyodo)
Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at a press briefing that the forthcoming meeting will be “an opportunity to ensure a smooth transition” of power before the U.S. president leaves office in January, as well as a chance to help ensure such channels of communication remain open.
As Trump, who decisively won the presidential election last week, is poised to take a much harder line against China, one of the officials suggested there will be no specific outcomes from Biden’s sit-down with Xi, but rather it is intended to “reflect on the progress to date.”
Without making any comments related to Trump, the senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the incoming administration needs to think “carefully” about key issues with Beijing, including Taiwan and the South China Sea, given that the significant policy gaps between the two countries are unlikely to disappear.
As U.S. officials have done in recent years when meeting with their Chinese counterparts, Biden is expected to express concerns about China’s increased military activities around Taiwan and aggressive actions in the South China Sea, as well as its “unfair” trade practices and often-criticized human rights situation.
Biden is also likely to urge Xi to stop China’s support for Russia’s defense industrial base, which is believed to have revitalized its military to continue fighting against Ukraine, according to the officials.
No provision of lethal assistance from China to Russia has been confirmed by the United States or its allies. But China’s transfer of massive amounts of dual-use materials to Russia is believed to have fueled its war machine.
U.S. officials have said roughly 90 percent of the microelectronics that Russia imports come from China and Hong Kong.
In mid-October, the U.S. government imposed its first sanctions on Chinese companies for “directly” developing and producing weapons for Russia to be used in its war against Ukraine.
Additionally, the officials said, Biden is set to raise the issue of the more than 10,000 North Korean troops deployed to Russia near Ukraine’s border, as Beijing has close ties with both Pyongyang and Moscow.
With Sullivan visiting Beijing in late August and Secretary of State Antony Blinken holding talks with China’s top diplomat Wang Yi in New York about a month later, the two countries have worked to arrange the third face-to-face meeting since the U.S. president took office nearly four years ago.
But with senior positions in Trump’s upcoming second administration already filling with known China hawks, as well as the president-elect’s promise to impose higher tariffs on Chinese imports, the course of the bilateral relationship appears likely to grow bumpier.
When congratulating Trump on his victory in the Nov. 5 election over the phone, the Chinese president said that “stable, sound and sustainable China-U.S. relations serve the interests of both countries and meet the expectations of the international community.”
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